Metaphor Death

Abstract

The issues involved in defining when the status of metaphor dies out have been a subject of considerable debate for many years. Formerly, a word was considered to be either a metaphor or to have a literal sense, regardless of whether it may have been a metaphor at one time or not. More recent studies have claimed that the question is much more complex than simply whether a word is metaphoric or non-metaphoric, even if only certain sub-categories are taken into account such as ‘conventional’ (a concept defined in more detail below under Lakoff and Turner’s (1989) discussion of disappearing metaphors), ‘dying’, ‘dead’ and so on. We shall first take a look at the different views on the stages of disappearing or extinct metaphors and then examine how this fits into an ongoing theory of evolution in metaphor networks.